open source marketer and community manager

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The strongest legacy of OpenStack Foundation is showing how to do open source at scale, with millions of dollar budget. Going well beyond the garages, the university labs, the funded startups and the small non-profits of the years before. OpenStack its practice on top of past experiences like the Apache way and the Ubuntu community habits. On top of those, the original teams at Rackspace and NASA built a solid fund-raising campaign, business development and marketing never seen before for an open source project.

At the core of all that effort stood four strong principles, today published in a book embedding the practice of open source. These are what makes OpenStack different and as of today, it’s the only place where open source projects get help with their open collaboration practice, beyond IP and events management.

OpenStack was started with the belief that a community of equals, working together in an open collaboration, would produce better software, more aligned to the needs of its users and more largely adopted. It was therefore started from day 0 as an open collaboration model that includes as many individuals and organizations as possible, on a level playing field, with everyone invited to design open infrastructure software.

Finally I took the time to clean up the Python code that publishes to images from the modified microwave toy to a WordPress site. I’m lying: the code is not clean at all but it serves its purpose… ship it!

In the process I learned a few things about WordPress REST API, Python and the Raspberry Pi. All fun. Python is basically the default language for Raspberry Pi. There are numerous modules to access all the hardware functions of the board and countless examples, tutorials, blog posts, wiki pages, meetups all about Python. The REST API Handbook is the main resource I used. Many tutorials online were written when the WP APIs were a separate plugin and they seem outdated. The handbook seems to be written with developers working within WordPress, with all examples provided in PHP and Javascript. I ended up writing a brief tutorial on how to create a post with images to WordPress using Python.

There are lots of photobooth applications targeting Raspberry Pis out there. I ended up forking drumminhands_photobooth which seemed polished enough. It’s originally designed to snap 4 pictures at the press of a button, blink a LED and show previews of the pictures on a screen, then create an animated GIF from the snapped poses and publish them to tumblr. Alternatively, publishes 4 independent JPEGs, based on a configuration option.

One cool thing about tumblr APIs is that they have a Python library dealing with authentication and the basic publishing operations. WordPress REST API don’t have anything like that (yet). Even authentication from a Python app requires an external plugin, which is not ideal.

The core of the photobooth app is the function publishing to WordPress:

Now every time someone pushes the Start button on the toy microwave, its light blinks and the screen shows instructions while snapping pictures and uploading them.

On the WordPress side, I picked Morphology Lite because of how the home page can be turned into a mosaic of images from the Featured image of the post. That’s it! I’ll update this post once I have enough images from an event.

I trust Mozilla to do the right things… in general. I trust so much that I agree to share Firefox telemetry data to its server. I trust Mozilla to hold my traffic data, bookmarks etc with Sync. The thing is that I remember being informed of those options the first time I start Firefox on a new machine. Trusting Mozilla and Firefox is a choice I make, even if it’s the default one.

I didn’t like waking up and reading that Mozilla partnered with a TV show and silently installed an add-on on my computer. I don’t care what that add-on does: Mozilla sneaked it in on my computer. I don’t remember seeing any notification upon restarting Firefox, like “Hey, we partnered with XYZ Corp to collect anonymous data and do something great with it” or “Sorry, we just need to make money… It’s all good, we keep everything private as usual and no marketing bozos will bother you… Do you mind not changing the default and let this add-on run?”

Speaking of surprises, an old friend contacted me to let me know of an ongoing campaign to raise fundings to build a Power-based motherboard for a laptop. The association hopes to raise 12,000EUR to complete the design of the motherboard as phase I, and their website lists the ranges for the other milestones. It’s pretty cool that nowadays one can design a whole new system basically from scratch and with such little investments.

While reading the PowerPC Notebook website, I realized that Amiga also is still producing new PowerPC motherboards and Amiga OS runs on them. Quite incredible… Loved that machine.

A few weeks ago I found an old first-generation Raspberry Pi hiding in a closet. At the same time I started investigating WordPress REST API at work. I also wanted an excuse to buy a Dremel. Everything seemed to align when I was strolling by the local Goodwill where my wife found an old toy microwave. Perfect excuses assembled, I had to buy a Dremel to fit a Raspberry Pi, its camera and a screen in a toy microwave to build a photobooth machine.

Several nights after, the hardware is ready. I found a used Dremel on Craigslist: great machine to cut the plastic quickly. I carved an opening in the microwave’s front door and mounted the Landzo display on it. For holding the Pi in place, I used a very low tech hack of wood sticks and glue, plus a rubber band. Unfortunately the first-gen Pi doesn’t have mounting holes on its base and I didn’t want to spend more money on a case. Good enough.

The microwave came with buttons and a LED that I connected to the board’s GPIO: the Start button starts the photobooth app, and the LED blinks while taking pictures. There are 4 more buttons that I will probably connect too for something fun, like show a video of actual food being cooked in the microwave… something for version 2 though.

In the next post I’ll talk a little more about the Python code I modified to use WordPress REST API.

The display is sold as compatible with Raspberry Pi and probably it is but it didn’t work out of the box. The box comes with a CD-ROM but I don’t have any way to read that old stuff anymore. The landzo.com website doesn’t seem to host the content of that CD-ROM either.

The Pi doesn’t use the correct video modes for the display out of the box so I had to read the documentation. The gist of it is that you need to add a new custom mode to /boot/config.txt as below:

[…]when you use /me on the IRC gateway while in private chat with someone, Slack just drops the message on the floor and doesn’t deliver it!

The company brags about their IRC gateway to lure in more groups and teams, but Slack and IRC are two totally different beasts: there will always be an increasing amount of pieces that get lost in translation.

The Slack-IRC gateway is just a trick to lock more users into the walled garden. Resist!

Sometimes I like to sit down and play with technology. My colleague Mike Shroder mentioned VVV a few weeks ago and I had to try it. Check out this tutorial I wrote on how to create a new WordPress site, use Vagrant and git to develop a new theme locally, then push the modifications to a live site running on DreamHost (but it could run anywhere else, really).

Open source communities offer a lot of democratic participation. The idea that you contribute to a project and have a say in its governance is a powerful one. When it doesn’t work, those same projects turn their backs on active contributors and discourage newcomers. The most recent OpenStack elections for Individual members to the Board of Directors is a strong example of how community voting fails and how to fix it.

This time I watched the elections from the distance, as much of an outsider as I have ever been. Now that the results are in, I’m very disappointed to see confirmed four Individual board members — half of the total — whose inaction during 2016 should have not granted them reconfirmation.

It’s also extremely sad to see more than a few very active individuals have not been elected. Of the eight elected, only one works for a smaller company and only one is mostly an OpenStack user (seven are primarily OpenStack vendors). The Individual members of the OpenStack Foundation were added to the bylaws to keep large corporate interests in check, and clearly this doesn’t seem to be working.

The OpenStack community has a huge problem here: good behavior and personal investments to improve the project don’t get rewarded. On the contrary, affiliation with large companies, spammy promotion, and geographic proximity seem to be more effective at granting a seat on the board. This has discouraged participation already, as some backchannel conversations have confirmed. You have to ask yourself, why would someone like Edgar Magana do what he has done for the short time he’s been on the board, when almost-inactive members get the votes?

A couple of immediate actions can be taken to improve the situation. First, acknowledge that an issue exists at the Board level, where too few small organizations and users are represented. Then, stop tolerating abuse of community resources like planet.openstack.org and use of the OpenStack logo. Actions should have followed OpenStack Foundation’s COO Mark Collier reminder to be nice during the campaign. Mark wrote:

With respect to local user groups and web channels, I think they should remain neutral ground that are open to all local community members.

But then the OpenStack logo (that’s another problem, known and unsolved for many years) was used to promote a single candidate as ‘our APAC‘ candidate. Who’s we exactly? OpenStack AU with the logo of the OpenStack Foundation? From my cursory glance at the candidates, there were others in APAC region, but I bet those candidates didn’t have direct access to the OpenStack AU Twitter feed.

One more thing: make the pages of the candidates more meaningful. They’re too wordy now, start with the generic bio and offer no link to hard facts. How many of the 3,000 voters actually read their pages (I bet they don’t, and we can easily find out with Google Analytics)? Members pages should show facts, not generic intention to make the world a better place. I always had the vision to collect data from analytics tools and show those in the individual member pages. Stackalytics already offers a pretty comprehensive view of what each person does, not just code-relate but emails, translations, work on bugs, and I bet more can be added from OpenStack Groups portal.

Communities need constant supervision and nurturing, they can’t be left unattended because as quickly as they have formed, they fall apart or at the very least lose critical focus. OpenStack is under tremendous pressure and now more than ever needs dedicated contributors to keep the project at the center of attention.

First Wix took code licensed under the GNU GPL, used it to enhance their code and shipped the combined work under a license not compatible with the GNU GPL, violating the rights of copyright holder Automattic.

Now, they’ve taken code distributed under the MIT license, very permissive, and relicensed under a new license they created ad-hoc. They call the new license “The Enhanced MIT License”, which is exactly like the MIT License, with one exception:

Any distribution of this source code or any modification thereof in source code format, must be done under the Enhanced MIT license and not under any other licenses, such as GPL.

The license file is basically a political manifesto against the copyleft licenses (like the GNU GPL), where they use the derogatory adjective ‘viral’ to describe the persistent nature of the four freedoms granted by the license.